‘Show me what?’

He straightened his shirt, then turned back to face her. ‘I’ll take you to meet her. You can see for yourself why I don’t want my mother anywhere near our wedding.’

* * *

The car came to a stop outside an immaculate two-storey house in a quiet Athenian suburb.

No sooner had the engine been turned off than Christian got out, not bothering to wait for the driver to open the door for him.

The entire drive had been conducted in silence, Christian sitting ramrod-straight, only the whiteness of his knuckles betraying what lay beneath his skin.

It was a demeanour Alessandra had never seen from him before. It unnerved her.

That he’d cancelled his first appointment of the day had unnerved her even more; that, and the grim way he’d said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

that she followed him out of the car and up the

appeared at the door, lines all over her weathered face, her thin lips clamped together in an obvious display of

on her heel and walked back inside, leaving the door

pristine, a strong smell of bleach

What could have been a beautiful

Markos could speak English, she made a good show of hiding it. She made no show of hiding her disdain for Alessandra, refusing her hand when Christian introduced them, and looking through her when Alessandra said, ‘Hárika ya tin gnorimía,’— ‘pleased to meet you’—a phrase she’d practised with the girl who’d brought breakfast to her suite that morning after Christian had grudgingly agreed to bring her

immaculate kitchen, where the stench of bleach was even stronger. No

Elena’s attention was on her son. She was speaking harshly to him in quick-fire Greek, whatever she said enough to make the pulse in his jawline throb. When he replied, his answers were short but measured. At one point he seemed to be the one doing the talking rather than the listening, his words making Elena dart her blue eyes to the stranger in the midst,

had never sat in such a poisonous atmosphere as this, or felt as

Markos’s demeanour. Her eyes were the same blue as Christian’s but were like a frozen winter

as icy as Elena’s

form of emotional entanglement when

the name Markos stood for guts and determination but had not appreciated then exactly how great his

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